


ask for answers

by voy



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Vague descriptions of violence, keith is there, mostly introspective, shiro has a nightmare and then thinks some thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 10:37:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15532410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voy/pseuds/voy
Summary: Some nights are made for lying awake and relearning how to breathe.





	ask for answers

**Author's Note:**

> this is a mess, but here it is. please take it as a paltry show of gratitude for all the content creators who've been putting their heart and soul into this fandom. you guys rock.

 

 

It was funny in a way, because he was never meant to outlive his prime. He’d existed with the knowledge that his body would fall apart faster than bodies were typically wont to. That he would weaken, condense into not much more than a burden, and be forced to watch as his peers carried on untouched for decades more.

He never had the expectation of time.

 

\---

 

Moments collapsed onto one another as the newest flood of red spilled over. The screaming, surging mass of voices. The grit of sand burrowing into open wounds. The adrenaline rushing violently through everything; pounding his head from the inside out. The fear. The bile in his throat and the blood that began to overtake it all. 

The sudden lightness of his right side unbalanced him. The world spun out, and trying to gather sense in the sensory overload crushing in from all angles proved fruitless. 

And then time could not reach him through the agony, and he fell on top of nothing, where something should have been. Fire ate at the edges. Air caught in his chest and stuck. Surely his heart would burst soon, explode under the pressure.

But something was stalking towards him. Relentless and uncaring of the way he'd been thrown to sea. He couldn’t catch his breath. It would kill him. Kill him faster than he was already dying. Time was catching up again, in sync with the shadow baring down.

Get up. 

His only choice. Get up. No more time.

Nerves shut off. Feeling left him. The overwhelming ring of silence. And there was a blade in his remaining hand. He watched as it swung forward, cutting a path through still air. Watched from inside his head, an enclosed, massive place, as the body moved around him. 

Blade met flesh.

Blood was the answer. It’s what they had wanted after all. They had called for more blood as though there was anything else to give. One way or another. Yours or someone else’s.

Blood was the beginning and the end.

The ground rose up around him and he jerked awake.

 

\---

 

It always seemed as though his dreams lay just beyond a hole in the wall. A large enough gap to peer through, to reach into, but too small to draw anything out of with a clenched fist. 

Let go, just enough, and maybe drag some scraps through. Not a whole thing, only pieces. But pieces were better than nothing. 

And behold, as his luck would play out, the wall caved in. It took his arm and the pieces in its grasp without regard. All of it now lay in grave of rubble. 

No goodbyes. No maybe-next-times. 

 

\---

 

His temples and the muscles of his shoulders ached dully in greeting as he woke. He had to consciously unclench his jaw, the hinge of it sticking and stubborn to release. A telling creak of grinding teeth accompanied as he did so. The heartbeat still throbbing in his throat began slowing gradually.

He kept his eyes closed as his mind caught up.

And for a long while he was spinning aimlessly in a black void.

Then a shift in the air around him stirred, changing his course upon contact.

A hand touched the center of his chest softly. Finally he opened his eyes. 

“Shiro?”

A voice thick with sleep. Glitter of eyes in the dark. The heavy warmth of another body pulling him back to the surface. He rested his hand over Keith’s for a moment before slowly drawing him in closer. 

There was a rustle of sheets as Keith easily entwined himself, a tickle of hair across his cheek, a steady rhythm of breaths against his throat.

He swallowed, unsticking the gnarled mess lodged there.

“I’m here.” 

Just a rough whisper, little more than a rasp of air. 

“I’m back.”

Keith burrowed a bit more into his shoulder. Arms tightening a fraction, pulling him securely back into orbit.

 

\---

 

Venus danced. Glowing fire-bright, arching across the cropped span of visible sky. He watched her progress from the grounding circle of Keith’s arms.

Sleep continued to evade him, but for once he wasn’t frustrated by it. The typical stirrings of restless anxiety, the need to fill his time, to busy himself, remained absent. He felt content to let everything wash over him. To let time play out unnoted.

And as he lay in serene darkness, with the whispered sounds of the desert at night seeping through the open window, he would admit to being proven wrong.

For so long, he had been living under the assumption that the universe was ruled by a cycle of taking. Stealing, winning, conquering. That nothing would be freely given. That it would be up to him to wrestle away what he could, while he could. 

But somewhere in the thick of everything something had changed. There had been an upheaval so monumental and slight he would never be able to parse out the when or how or why.

Because love wasn’t something you could take. 

He supposed he’d never factored in that someone would love him; not to this extent. Because it didn't feel like he’d done anything to deserve this kind devotion. Because Keith had given himself freely and entirely without expectation or stipulation. 

In the expanse of a universe Keith was such a small thing. And he had single handedly destroyed the ruling force of Shiro’s universe all the same.

He could kiss him. 

He would, once the sun brought Keith back to the waking world. And it would be a kiss that says “you’ll never know how much”, because words could never scrape the surface of his feeling.

He could only hope it translated it all. Everything that had trickled down into the now. A coalescing of who he had been and what he was. The role he was meant to play; both assigned and chosen. The body he lived in and the barriers it imposed. The blood it contained, singing through him. The small, solitary body he was tethered to now, and the voice that had reached him in the void. The grace given by that voice telling him, a fragmented slip of something flawed and sentient, that he was enough. 

That he was worth holding on to.

And he was here, were existed the sleepy shift of two bodies, a cool dry breeze tangled in the bottle-cap wind chime hanging from the eve, the slow pulsing dance of lights across the sky and through his blood.

The world was breathing around him.

He realized he could too.

And so he let himself.


End file.
